A Portrait of the Artist as a Game Studio

While we often see the evolution of artists working in old media, ever-shifting technical terrain tends to obscure videogame makers' aesthetic trajectories. In Thatgamecompany's pathbreaking and gorgeous games for the Playstation 3, we get the rare chance to watch these artists at work against a fixed technological backdrop

Artists' aesthetics evolve and deepen over time. You can see it
in their work, as immaturity and coarseness give way to sophistication
and polish. In
most media, an audience witnesses this aesthetic evolution take
place within the most mature form of that medium.

Between 1930s and the 1950s, for example, the abstract
expressionist painter Mark Rothko's work evolved from mythical
surrealism to multiform
abstractions to his signature style of rectilinear forms.
Different motivations and inspirations moved Rothko during these two
decades, but at every
stage of his artistic career, the painter's work could be
experienced as painting, as medium on canvas. As flatness and pigment on
linen.

Games are so tightly coupled to consumer electronics that technical progress outstrips aesthetic progress in the public imagination.

Likewise, the contemporary American novelist Ben Marcus has
explored his unique brand of experimental fiction in three novels, and
his style and effect
have changed and deepened as his writing career has progressed.
Marcus's 1995 novel The Age of Wire and String uses a technical perversion of
English that the author coerces into fantastic and nearly inscrutable tales of rural life. The 2002 follow-up Notable American Women
refines his
semantic surrealism into a more legible narrative, but one in
which language itself remains untrustworthy. And in this year's Flame Alphabet,
Marcus reaches a new summit, a book in which language kills from
the inside out. Once more, an artist births and refines experimental
style, but
carries out that evolution within the standard form of the art
in question: the offset-printed hardback book.

Aesthetic evolution need not move from lesser to greater effect.
Since 1999, M. Night Shyamalan has practiced his signature brand of
filmmaking, in
which supernatural situations end in dramatic plot twists. But
between The Sixth Sense (1999) and The Last Airbender (2010),
Shyamalan's
artistic success faltered even as his films continued to perform
well at the box office. Decline notwithstanding, all his films
were still printed to
celluloid and projected onto anamorphic widescreen cinema
screens.

In painting, literature, and film the public can see an artist's
work evolve (or devolve) because that work is accessible to audiences in
their native
forms. Archivists or scholars might dig into a creator's
sketchbooks or retrieve early works, but such museum work is not
required for the ordinary
viewer or reader to grasp the changes and refinements of work
over time. This perception of creative progress is a part of the
pleasure of art, whether
through the joy of growth or the schadenfreude of decay.

In videogames, it's far less common to see a creator's work
evolve in this way. In part, this is because game makers tend to have
less longevity than
other sorts of artists. In part, it's because games are more
highly industrialized even than film, and aesthetic headway is often
curtailed by
commercial necessity. And in part, it's because games are so
tightly coupled to consumer electronics that technical progress
outstrips aesthetic
progress in the public imagination.

Where there are game makers with a style, it has often evolved
over long durations. Will Wright's discovery and later mastery of the
software toy
simulation, from SimCity to SimEarth to The Sims; or John Carmack and John Romero's revolutionary exploitation of new powers in
real-time 2d and 3d graphics in Commander Keen, Doom, and Quake; or Hideo Kojima's development and refinement of the stealth
action games of the Metal Gear series, characterized by solitude, initial weakness, cinematic cut-scenes, and self-referential commentary.

These styles evolved over decades, and they did so in the arms of
financial success and corporate underwriting. Structurally speaking,
they are more
like Shyamalan than like Rothko and Marcus, the latter two
artists having struggled to find their respective styles outside of the
certainty of
commercial success.

In independent games, wherein we must hope that aesthetics drive creators more than commercialism, creative evolution often
takes place in
tentative ways, in forms far less refined and mature than the
videogame console that serves as the medium's equivalent to the cinema
or the first-run
hardback. Experimental titles may take their first form on a PC
or a mobile device as humble experiments. If very fortunate, as have
been game makers
like Jonathan Blow (Braid), Jonathan Mak (Everyday Shooter), or Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel (World of Goo),
those games might find
their way to the Nintendo Wii or the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation
3. But today, the artists who work in game development for its beauty
before its
profitability typically don't get to choose the most public of
venues in which to experiment and come of age artistically.

Thatgamecompany's new title Journey is an exception. The
game is the third in a three-deal exclusive that the studio's principals
signed with
Sony right out of grad school at the University of Southern
California. Thanks to the Sony exclusive and the oversight of Sony's
Santa Monica studio,
all three of the games the studio has produced have targeted the
PlayStation 3 from the beginning. This is not a remarkable feat for a
Rothko or a
Marcus--such artists simply pick up the generic media of canvas
or page and work with them directly. But the PS3 is tightly controlled
and its
development kits are expensive. The machine sets a high bar,
too--a complex multicore architecture with streamlined co-processors
meant to enhance speed
and throughput for specialized tasks, especially vector
processing for graphical rendering.

Thatgamecompany's work thus offers us an unusual window into the
creative evolution of a game maker, one in which the transition from
green students to
venerable artists took place before our very eyes over a short
half-decade on a single and very public videogame platform.

Flow, Flower, Flowest

During graduate school, thatgamecompany's creative director Jenova Chen
became obsessed with the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept
of flow, the psychological feeling of being fully involved
in an experience. Csikszentmihalyi's book on the subject was published
in 1990, but a
definition for the phenomenon is often cribbed from a 1996 Wired interview: "Being
completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego
falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows
inevitably from the
previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and
you're using your skills to the utmost." In musical terms, flow means
being in the groove; in athletic terms, we call it being in the zone. Flow is a state of being, one in which a task's difficulty is perfectly
balanced against a performer's skill, resulting in a feeling of intense, focused attention.

Chen devoted his MFA thesis to the application of Flow in Games. In his
interpretation, flow can be
graphed on a two-dimensional axis, challenge on the horizontal
axis and ability on the vertical. He then identifies a space surrounding
the line that
extends from low challenge and ability to high, which he calls
the "flow zone." This zone is nestled between anxiety above (too much
challenge,
insufficient ability) and boredom below (not enough challenge,
too much ability). Different players, argues Chen, have different flow
zones,
representing higher and lower capacities for each.

Chen contends that to reach broader audiences, games need to fit a
wider variety of flow zones, either by expanding those zones, or by
adjusting the
game to better match a specific player's zone. The latter could
be done implicitly through automated adjustment, or explicitly via
player choice.

To illustrate this principle, Chen and several USC colleagues made a slick, abstract online game aptly titled flOw.
In the game, the player
controls a microorganism in a pool of water. Eating loose bits
(or the bits of other, smaller creatures) grows the player's creature.
Two types of orbs
allow the player to dive deeper into the murk, where the enemies
are slightly more threatening, or to rise to a level above.

flOw
was the game that led Sony to sign Chen and his collaborators,
including fellow USC students Kellee Santiago, Nick Clark, and John
Edwards. The PS3
version, released in 2007, is really just a fancier and more
beautiful version of the Flash original.

You can see what Chen was aiming for: flOw was meant to allow players to move through the game at their own pace, either adjusting challenge by
diving deeper, or by adjusting ability by devouring more creature bits. But there was a problem.

Even though the game ticked the boxes Chen had theorized, the
player controlled the creatures by manipulating the pitch and yaw axes
of the gyroscopic
sixaxis controller. This awkward interface couldn't be tuned by
player or by machine. The strange and surprising exertion the game
demanded was further
amplified by its mildly hallucinogenic, throbbing visuals.
Chen's theory of flow in games hadn't taken account of the interface and
environmental
elements, but only the game's system.

Another factor contributed to a dissonance between flOw in practice and flowin
theory. In creating his model of flow zones in games,
Chen didn't adopt Csikszentmihalyi's approach, but rather
simplified it significantly. For Csikszentmihalyi, flow does not exist
between anxiety and
boredom; those states correspond with high challenge/low skill
and low challenge/medium skill, respectively. True flow does not exist
all along the
line bisecting the two axes, but only at its top-rightmost
corner, where both challenge and skill are highest.

The combination of these two factors reveal the game's flaw: Being in the zone or in the groove may seem like a type of hallucinatory,
out-of-body experience, but it's really a practice of awareness so deep that it moves beyond conscious decision. flOw
externalized the quietude
and smoothness of flow into the game's visual aesthetics, which
are truly striking. But the experience itself suggests a
misinterpretation rather than
an embrace of Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is not a matter of planning
and comfort, but one of deep, durable expertise.

Thatgamecompany's 2008 follow-up, Flower, could be called a three-dimensional, representational version of flOw.
Instead of a
multicellular creature, the player controls the wind, blowing
flower petals through the air with the pitch and roll axes of the
sixaxis controller. By
flying near other flowers, the player's wind gust can pick up
additional petals, and the groups of petals can be used to unlock or
"enliven" dead
zones--restoring life and color in a world dark with industry.

If flOw erred on the side of behavior, Flower
steered too far in the direction of environment. The game is so lush and
beautiful, with
its wafting grasses and rosy sunsets that the repetitive
petal-collecting experience detracts from an otherwise idyllic
experience of visitation. Where flOw proved violent and delirious, Flower became overdemanding and distracting, a nuisance of a game getting in the way of the experience
of its gorgeous computer scenery.

Like Goldilocks's porridge, Journey finally reconciles
these two poles: neither too anxious nor too distracting. The game
finally admits that
the application of flow in games is best left to those that allow
mastery at the highest levels of skill and challenge--games like
basketball and Street Fighter and chess and go and Starcraft. Journey forgoes abstract, dynamically adjusted gameplayin
favor of simple
exploration, which allows the player to enjoy the haunting
desert civilization the game erects from invented, abstract myth.

As it turns out, the appealing aspects of flOw and Flower would be found less in their openness to new players through tunable gameplay
and more in the unique and striking worlds they created for players to explore.

flOw
's modest environment was already enough; the turquoise, shallow
murk giving way to threatening dark blue as the player descends into
the ocean that is
the game's setting. The undiscovered creatures darken the
shadows below, previewing them in a deft visual portent. The game's
relative difficulty or
facility never had anything on the tiny intrigue of a droplet.
For its part, Flower offered a world rather than a microcosm,
but it forced the
player to focus on its fauna, and eventually the tenuous
couplings between the man-made world and the natural one. These settings
were the stars of the
games.

Journey
finally learns this lesson. Set in a mysterious, mythical desert civilization, the game abandons the cloying framing of Flower's levels, which
claimed to offer the dreams of citybound buds. Instead, Journey explains nothing and apologizes for nothing. Like Star Wars or Spirited Away, Journey makes the correct assumption that a bewitching, lived-in world is enough.

So much goes unanswered in Journey, from the very first
screen. The creatures are humanoid but not human, or not identifiably
so. They have eyes
and dark skin, or else eyes but no faces. The desert dunes are
littered with monuments--are they pathmarkers? Tombstones? Relics?
Advertisements?
Sandfalls douse chasms lined with temples dressed in patterns
reminiscent of Islamic geometric art. Fabric banners flap in the breeze
awaiting the
player's touch. Pixel shaders push synaesthesia: the yellow
sands feel hot somehow, and the pink sands cool. One environment--"level"
seems too prosaic a
word here--is cast entirely in shadow, and the blue sand and
rising ribbons pay homage to the underwater worlds of flOw.

In Journey, thatgamecompany finally discovers that
facility was never the design problem they were looking for. Its games
are about the feeling
of being somewhere, not about the feeling of solving something.

Thatgamecompany's titles are elemental, each pursuing a precise, careful characterization of a material form. For flOw, it was water. For Cloud (another student game that predates the studio), vapor. For Flower, grass. And for Journey, sand. In flOw, these
materials surround the player. In Cloud, the player ejects them. In Flower, the player passes through them on the way elsewhere. But in Journey,
the sand has texture: it slips under the player's nomad at times, its
dunes force it back at others. It covers the air like murk, and
when pushed to its limits flips into snow.

These materials and environments make Journey, partly for
their conception, and partly thanks to the smooth, delightful rendering
John Edwards
and his engineers manage to squeeze out of the PS3. The machine may have
implicitly promised enormous, realistic game environments like those of
Red Dead Redemption or Saints Row, but Journey shows that the world is fashioned from its tiny details as much as its cities.

Journey
also--finally--abandons the sixaxis control in favor of the more
conventional analog stick convention (although the device can be tilted
to look in
different directions). While I suspect the designers feared they
might descend into the ghetto of the adventure game by making such a
compromise,
instead the more traditional controls finally allow the serenity
and mystery that has been on the surface of each of their previous
games to embrace
the reality of experience and not just the theory of design.

Zero's Journey

Indeed, given the usual subjects of videogames, players would be forgiven to mistake Journey's title for an adventure. The hero's journey is a
common theme in videogames, but that formula requires a call to adventure, an ordeal, a reward, and a return. Journey offers none of these
features, but something far more modest instead.

When the game starts, the player ascends a sand dune to a view of
a tall mountain with a slit peak. The destination is implied, but no
reason given. To
progress, the player crosses the sands to discover and collect
orbs that extend a scarf on his or her robes. When filled with the
symbols imbued by
orbs or cloth, the player can fly briefly to reach new summits
or avoid obstacles. The same symbols line the walls of the game's temple
ruins and
emanate above the player to signal others and carry out
actions--a lost language with no meaning implied nor deciphered.

As the player moves from dunes to temples to lost cities, she
must spread energy to neglected apparatuses. Just as the player's scarf
lightens her
feet, so cloth seems to be generally transformative in Journey's universe. These cloth portals spread bridges over chasm at times and unleash
fabric birds and jellyfish at others.

Fantastic, yes, but not a hero's journey. Insofar as it has one,
it seems impossible not to read the game's story allegorically instead
of mythically:
an individual progresses from weakness, or birth, or ignorance,
or an origin of any kind, through discovery and challenge and danger and
confusion,
through to completion. It could be a coming of age, or a
metaphor for life, or an allegory of love or friendship or work or
overcoming sickness or
slouging off madness. It could mean anything at all.

Thatgamecompany should be both praised and faulted for taking
such a morally, culturally, and religiously ambiguous position; surely
every sect and
creed will be able to read their favorite meaning onto the game.
On the one hand, this move underscores thatgamecompany's
sophistication: in a medium
where interpretation is scorned as indulgent and pretentious, Journey gives no ground: the player must bring something to the table.

On the other hand, the careful player may find the result as
barren as it is receptive. After each environment, a white figure (A
god? A mother? The
mind's mirror? The artist's muse?)incants silently to the player's red-robed humanoid. When she does, recent events are added to an inscription
of the journey thus far, rendered as if in symbol on rock or papyrus. But not just thus far,
also a bit further, the theme of the next scene
revealed in abstract, hieroglyphic form. Is the future being
foretold, or is everyone's future always the same? In a very real way,
the latter is true
for Journey, as everyone's journey through the game will
follow the same overall progression through the same environments. With
one exception.

That Journey is an online game is mystery many players may
never discover. The game itself never makes any such claims, and as a
downloadable it
arrives with no manual or instructions. Save for a subtle nod at
the end of the game's credits (which many players may overlook or miss
entirely), only
reviews and interviews with the creators reveal a feature whose
extensive design and engineering becomes the silent center of the game,
the wind that
moves it.

Sometimes while you play, the game will invisibly match you up
with another PS3 owner who is also playing in the same environment.
There's not much you
can do with your companion--speech isn't possible, but touching
one another refills the energy in the cloth of both characters' scarves.
Pressing one of
the controller buttons emits a ping that can help a player find
his companion and, when used improvisationally, might allow basic
signaling. Only one
companion appears at a time, although a player might encounter
many over the course of the game.

These encounters with the other are both touching and disturbing.
For one part, there is no mistaking a companion for an artificial
intelligence; it
moves too erratically, or speeds ahead to steal the next objective too
definitively, or falls behind too listlessly. Even given the minimal
actions of Journey, somehow these ghost players appear rounder than most of the scripted, voice-acted characters in contemporary videogames.

For another part, you don't really play with these other
players. They are there with you, doing what you do, helping at times
and hindering at
others, plodding senselessly toward a mountain peak that has no
meaning save for those imbued by a few foreboding, pregnant camera pans.
You're
comforted by their presence. It's like sitting on the couch
close to someone, watching TV.

Journey
's anonymous multiplayer interactions are touching, but they are
also tragic, like a Beckett novel with characters in red robes
mumbling, "I can't go
on, I'll go on" in inscrutable pictograms. At one point in the
deep scarlet shadow of the caves, I swear I saw my companion crumble to
dust. If only
Sartre had known that one could always just turn off the
console, Matrix-style.

If Journey's journey is anyone's, then it can mean
anything we make of it. But a tabula rasa carries all meaning and no
meaning all at once. For
me, the journey was less my own than that of thatgamecompany
itself, a band of students stumbling toward improbable success and
surfing it clumsily at
first, but then more certainly.

Thatgamecompany's crew is still largely comprised of USC
Interactive Media MFA alumni, a division of the institution's famed
cinema school. It's no
wonder that their games are cinematic, not only in appearance and
duration (Journey lasts a little over two hours), but also in structure. Journey and Flower demonstrate a rare mastery of the denouement in games. Good filmic storytellers end their tales quickly and
definitively after resolving the main conflict. After a laborious set of levels, Flower erupted in the fast-paced, colorful rebirth of a
deadened, grayscale city and then concluded. Journey's
denouement is even more dramatic and far more sentimental. Near the
mountain's summit, in
the snow, progress becomes more and more difficult. Pace slows,
then stops. My character, red hood now grey with the crust of ice,
succumbs to the cold
earth. The screen goes white.

Then, suddenly, the mysterious white god-mother appears and looks
over me. What she does remains ambiguous: some will say she resurrects
me, others
will claim my spirit is ejected into eternity, and still others
will interpret the last scene as a final bodily hallucination. But
through whirlwinds
and cloth banners and the bright cobalt of sun and snow and
dawn, I rush up to the summit. Who can resist the exhilaration? It's
invigorating, like a
cold winter wind on flushed cheeks.

When they speak about their games, Jenova Chen and Kellee
Santiago often express a hope that they might explore or arouse positive
emotions in their
players, emotions they do not feel from other sorts of games.
Isn't this sense of delight and vitality precisely what they are after?
Yes, to be sure.
But it is also the thrill of all victories, and the vertigo of
all dizzinesses. Chen and Santiago sell themselves short with this this
trite
incantation about emotions. For their journey has not been one
of creating outcomes, but of culturing a style, an
aesthetic that defines
the experience without need for their aphorisms. Instead: the sand and
the ruins. The wind and the fabric. The silence of a cryptographic
mythology. The vertigo of breeze, the swish of dunes.

For my part, I plodded through the snow near the summit of Journey's
cleft mountain with another traveler, one who entered that scene with a
regal scarf flowing far behind, easily twice as long as my own.
We stumbled up the mountain together, cowering behind stone tablets to
avoid the wind.
At one point, I hobbled out foolishly before one of the game's
serpentine flying enemies, who dove and sent us flying back. The impact
eviscerated most
of his scarf, and I felt guilty.

We took our final slog through the dense snow and thick wind, and
we both collapsed together under its weight. Thinking back, I elongate
the short
moment before the game interrupted me with its cloying samsaric
angel, and I imagine that this fallen other was Jenova or Kellee rather
than some
stranger, that they had allowed me to join them on their journey
to journeyman. Before the screen goes white I imagine whispering my
tiny counsel in
the hope they might yet reach mastery: This. This is enough.

Ian Bogost is a writer, game designer, and contributing editor at The Atlantic. He is the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in media studies and a professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.